Compare and Contrast Woodchucks and Traveling Through The Dark
AP literature and comp Compare & Contrast "Woodchucks" and “Traveling Through the Dark" In the works by William Stafford and Maxine Kumin “Traveling Through the Dark” and “Woodchucks”, each poet illustrates death of animals and the impacts humans have on it. “Woodchucks” creates a perspective of war between man and animal, the plot quickly escalates into something deadly. On the other hand, “Traveling Through the Dark” Is simply between a man and an innocent deer, showing respect to animals. The language and tone, imagery, and themes in these poems help the readers understand what’s going through the minds of these two very different individuals. The poem “Traveling Through the Dark” deals with man vs. nature. The experience described is concrete. He describes a deer, lifeless on the ground and his dilemma on whether or not he should push it off the road, sparing other people’s lives, or keep it on the road. The speaker has a genuinely sincere relationship with this deer. The poem’s tone is compassionate and also depressing at the same time. The speaker feels deeply bad for the deer, who is an innocent bystander of human technology and our carelessness towards nature. The language in this poem suggests he wants to be forgiven for this accident, and he’s paying his respect for this stiffened, cold deer. He is trying to justify himself by comparing the deer to a women, by mentioning that the deer was pregnant with an unborn fawn. The speaker’s afraid to admit that the deer is pregnant though, by not outright saying it. The speaker puts it in a way that we can digest, it would be harder for us to digest that the deer is indeed pregnant. He uses the personification of the wilderness listening, “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; / around our group I could hear the wilderness listen” (line 15). It’s almost as if he’s waiting for an answer from the wilderness on what he should do. He also personified the car in lines thirteen and fourteen,